


Names Have Power (so do i)

by xixixixi



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/F, F/M, Female Percy Jackson, Friendship, Genderbending, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 09:57:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19270909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xixixixi/pseuds/xixixixi
Summary: Theseus, Odysseus, Orpheus, Perseus, sometimes it’s obvious that they’re all the same- men. (One of these is not)orA tale of a girl or two, carving their immovable names into history.





	1. Chapter 1

_At the Beginning_

Perseus Jackson, was born on August the 18th as the healthy daughter of Sally Jackson, an incredible woman, and Poseidon, an inadequate god. She cried as if she could feel the weight of her fate crushing her.

Already, there was a certain heart-breaking sorrow that radiated outward from the baby, as it wailed for the sea green eyes that had flashed kindly once, before disappearing from her life for the next twelve years. There was a father-shaped hole in her life, one that even a god could not fill. New York trembled with thunder and clouds burst with rain for the first few days of Percy’s life, as if a higher being was echoing her sadness.

The nurses found themselves experiencing a mixture of pity and fear as they whispered to each other about the ever-stranger things that seemed to be happening to the new-born child, the longer she stayed in the hospital. They now approached her with an unnatural caution, unable to shake the memory of the choked scream they had heard when one of the nurses had found the child playing fondly with a strangled snake in her cot.

They found themselves loving and fearing the child at the same time, a feeling that was foreign, and that even the most experienced among them did not know how to deal with. But when the mother of the child murmured to it lovingly 'You are special darling, so so special. The world isn’t going to be ready for you,' they couldn’t help but nod in agreement.

Sally Jackson was a kind and wonderfully human woman who lacked the otherworldly aura that Perseus seemed to possess already (how a baby had achieved this, the nurses had no idea. They could only speculate to each other about faerie children and reincarnation in hushed tones, before laughing at such silliness with doubt in their hearts), but even she displayed a strange determination when she insisted on the undeniably masculine name for the tiny girl.

'History is sick of male heroes and powerless maidens with tragedy in their souls,' Sally said cryptically, 'Perseus will be neither.'

She was almost right.

There was plenty of tragedy in Percy Jackson’s soul.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is very short, but more is coming. You cannot stop it. Did anyone ask for this fic? No, but I would die for some good, self-indulgent fem! Percy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy's progression throughout her more difficult years of school, when she hadn't quite grown into her strangeness.

When Percy was a child, she sometimes quietly wished that she had been born a boy.

Percy was the fastest kid in her year when she was seven, and when she won every single race she competed in at sports day, she smiled harder than she ever had before. Sally snapped forty five pictures that day, as every other parent did, and Percy sparkled in every one of them with bright shiny eyes, and dark curls falling out of her messy ponytail, and smug contentment as she flashed a thumbs up at the camera with boys heaving helplessly behind her, impossibly red faces. Sally had felt proud, the fierce type of pride that any mortal mother felt for a child that finally received a fraction of the recognition they deserved.

She didn’t know that a few days after, Percy overheard a boy calling himself the fastest in the class, and no one else had said a word while every single other boy agreed in such unity that it was as if they were collectively defending the honour of a fallen comrade. She didn’t know that Percy challenged him to a race with a stony glare and acidic forced politeness, and she didn’t know that Percy had to do it four times until the kid stopped claiming that he was going easy on her because she was a girl. Percy never told Sally, because it felt terrible enough that she was disappointed in herself for being a girl, and yet it would have been impossibly worse for her mom to be disappointed in her for being a girl. Percy wondered silently, painfully if her name meant that she was an unexpected failure, a miscalculation, if this wondrous strength had been stolen from a boy called Perseus.

Percy was troubled enough that normal schools were found to be unsuitable for her, made obvious by the fact that she could count the number of books she had finished in her life with her hands. She would sit down with a steely determination and find herself exhausted when an hour later, she was five pages in, and had read the same paragraph ten times over until the words might as well have been dancing the Macarena in front of her eyes.

Gabe would sneer at her when she threw the book halfway across the room in aching frustration, and crow in delight at any show of defeat with a hundred words to dig a little deeper into Percy’s skin.

‘You’re real lucky kid,’ Gabe’s laugh was as ugly as him, with jagged edges designed to hurt, to catch on Percy’s faults, and drag them open into bleeding wounds. ‘You’re lucky that you’re going to grow up pretty enough that no one will care you’re dumb as an animal.’

Percy would scowl at Gabe and promise that her aim in throwing the book would be a lot more accurate next time, but time after time, she began to open the book less, and Gabe’s words built layers upon themselves and coated her, heavy and poisonous.

Grover was her first, and only friend. He was nervous, and scrawny, and smelled like wet fur, but he treated her with an effortless sort of kindness that screamed softly that he would love her the same no matter what she was. He bumped shoulders harder than anyone else would, and he told her that she looked fantastic whether she wore a dress or jean shorts filled with holes, and Percy liked the way that he laughed, when he nervously giggled at her jokes, or when he threw his head back and bleated in a way that you couldn’t fake.

He was her first friend through luck. Fortune finally allowed Percy a fellow sixth-grader that didn’t inch uncomfortably away when she spoke of men with too many eyes, men with too few eyes, men that weren’t men at all, all things that wavered on the edges of her vision. People told Percy to go see a doctor, to fix whatever was screwed up and twisted wrong inside her. They always looked nervous, and scared, even when their mouths were twisted with cruelty, which Percy never understood because if you were going to insult someone, you might as well do it with brazen disregard for their anger. It was better to go out in glowing, furious, righteous anger, than to curl up and flinch from your own words.

She might have fought back, might have torn them all apart, but might have also crumpled at her terrifying real-false hallucinations that her false-real classmates cowered from. Her salvation was Grover. Grover, who still looked nervous, scared, but inexplicably, life-savingly, not at her. Only at the world, at the cruelty of others, at the men who were not men. He only looked on her with fondness.

He was her only friend by choice. There were the girls that laughed at her hair, her face, her teeth, the way she bit her nails, how she did her best to hide the slight tremble whenever a teacher’s voice crescendoed into harshness, the ugly black lines that made up her handwriting, everything strange thing under the sun that made up the unattractive, absurd, all-too-touchable being known as Percy Jackson.

Unthinkably, they were the same girls who occasionally grew bored with laughing at her, extending their hands, crowned with unbitten nails, and exuding their normality, giggling politely as they requested that Percy tag along like an adorable pet. They wanted her to smile and nod at their jokes, to protect them in their flimsy feuds with her fierce loyalty that none of them could ever earn, and do her little tricks like a tame animal.

Percy liked to laugh at them then with a sound that sounded less like her usual brightly authentic laugh, more a rhythmic tinkling that rained poisonous scorn upon them.

If any of them knew who Percy really was (more than a collection of harmless flaws), or saw the golden tinge in her glittering red blood (too bad no one worked in visible wounds), they would have known to steer clear of girls who could call gods fathers, who were on the verge of becoming someone dangerous.

‘You’re really special, Perce,’ Grover would say with varying levels of severity. Sometimes giggling as she successfully drank milk through her nose. Sometimes in frozen awe as she swam laps and laps without surfacing, and when she did, it was only to reassure everyone watching that she was still alive.

‘Not really,’ Percy would reply, shrugging. The word had no power for a girl that didn’t believe it. Not when the sweet words from the people that loved her were so vastly outnumbered by the bitterness of people that had no reason to lie.  

‘No you are,’ he would insist, until Percy would smile sadly, indulgently. ‘But you know what?’

‘What?’ Percy didn’t think there was anything else to say to the false hero Grover had painted of her.

‘We’ll always be friends, even if you aren't.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Grover is the best best friend.


End file.
